A new book on cannibalism in the 1921 Russian famine
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Of course it does make for a pretty sensational title and probably better book sales.
These people didn't necessarily want to alleviate immediate material suffering in the here and now. They wanted to Achieve Communism, which would supposedly alleviate material suffering forever. If that meant tens of millions had to be sacrificed on that altar, so be it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodrazvyorstka#Soviet_prodraz...
Beside everything else (like massive loss of work capable men and horses (there were no tractors back then) due to WWI and the Civil War), the important point here is that usually everything was taken away, including that grain, potatoes, etc. that would otherwise be used as seeds next year. Not having anything to plant next year naturally amplified the situation into such a severe famine. In general dominance of such short-term approaches were the hallmark of USSR through all its existence.
Another situation of famine and related cannibalism - 2 and half year siege of Leningrad during WWII by Germans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Leningrad#Cannibalism
and some stats :
"By December 1942 the NKVD had arrested 2,105 cannibals – dividing them into two legal categories: corpse-eating (trupoyedstvo) and person-eating (lyudoyedstvo). The latter were usually shot while the former were sent to prison. The Soviet Criminal Code had no provision for cannibalism, so all convictions were carried out under Code Article 59–3, "special category banditry".[72] Instances of person-eating were significantly lower than that of corpse-eating; of the 300 people arrested in April 1942 for cannibalism, only 44 were murderers.[73] 64% of cannibals were female, 44% were unemployed, 90% were illiterate, 15% were rooted inhabitants, and only 2% had any criminal records. More cases occurred in the outlying districts than in the city itself. Cannibals were often unsupported women with dependent children and no previous convictions, which allowed for a certain level of clemency in legal proceedings.[74]
Given the scope of mass starvation, cannibalism was relatively rare.[75] Far more common was murder for ration cards. In the first six months of 1942, Leningrad witnessed 1,216 such murders. At the same time, Leningrad was experiencing its highest mortality rate, as high as 100,000 people per month. Lisa Kirschenbaum notes that rates "of cannibalism provided an opportunity for emphasizing that the majority of Leningraders managed to maintain their cultural norms in the most unimaginable circumstances."[75] "
For all intents and purposes it is the same political entity.
And “Soviet” as an adjective describes organs of the RSFSR, those of any of the other soviet republics that came to constitute the USSR, or of the USSR itself.
The Soviet Union managed to kill millions in the 1930s as well.
It's not a pleasant topic. Some people ate their children to survive. It's interesting though how very well meaning utopian policies can lead to this result. Planting the seed 5 ft beneath the ground will result in great crops because the seed will have to struggle and thus only the best seed will make it to harvest. And of course all that seed buried that far down didn't make it at all. But that is your fault, traitor, not infallible Great Leader's.
The largest tragedy of the 21st century is that people still think these policies and these people were 'well-meaning' or 'it just went a bit wrong'. It seems that only when we defeat murderous totalitarians militarily that we understand them for what they are.
Socialist countries saw many deaths due to malevolence because it often took violent authoritarians to institute socialist governments in the first place. One can argue about whether those deaths should be held against "socialism" per se. But what's almost unique about socialism is how many deaths resulted even when the government was not acting malevolently or negligently. Tens of millions of people died in the Soviet Union and China not due to gulags and purges, but because socialism is a bad way to organize an economy. Socialist reforms of agricultural production, in particular, destroyed production.
Those deaths are squarely attributable to socialism per se. It's the result of removing market signals, distorting incentives, and replacing the capital-owning class who knows how to operate the economy, etc. What would happen to say Waymo if you replaced its investors and management with the folks who run the U.S. Digital Service along with "stakeholders" from among the employees and "local community?" You'd destroy it, because that's a terrible way to run a company. That's what socialist countries did with agriculture.
Yes, this is the part[0] and it's worth reading about it at length (I've added paragraph breaks).
The TL;DR, with a Hacker News spin: a small startup of entrepreneurial Chinese hackers working in stealth mode disrupted the existing socialist system of agriculture and changed everything :-)
In more detail:
In December 1978, eighteen of the local farmers, led by Yen Jingchang, met in the largest house in the village. They agreed to break the law at the time by signing a secret agreement to divide the land, a local People's Commune, into family plots. Each plot was to be worked by an individual family who would turn over some of what they grew to the government and the collective whilst at the same time agreeing that they could keep the surplus for themselves.
The villagers also agreed that should one of them be caught and sentenced to death that the other villagers would raise their children until they were eighteen years old. At the time, the villagers were worried that another famine might strike the village after a particularly bad harvest and more people might die of hunger.
After this secret capitalist reform, Xiaogang village produced a harvest that was larger than the previous five years combined. Per capita income in the village increase from 22 yuan to 400 yuan with grain output increasing to 90,000 kg in 1979.
This attracted significant attention from surrounding villages and before long the government in Beijing had found out. The villagers were fortunate in that at the time China had just changed leadership after Mao Zedong had died. The new leadership under Deng Xiaoping was looking for ways to reform China's economy and the discovery of Xiaogang's innovation was held up as a model to other villages across the country.
This led to the abandonment of collectivised farming across China and a large increase in agricultural production. The secret signing of the contract in Xiaogang is widely regarded as the beginning of the period of rapid economic growth and industrialisation that mainland China has experienced in the thirty years since.
It’s awfully hard to imagine that Mao actually was hoping that people would die, and that they would die en masse of starvation: even if he was strictly self-serving and heartless, he must have known in the back of his mind that huge populations of starving people are unpredictable and difficult to govern. The only way I can picture this taking place is that he (like all dictators) successfully instilled such fear in his direct reports that they never gave him bad news or challenged what he thought sounded like good ideas at the time.
Mao was focused on re-imagining the state and purging old ways of thinking, governance, etc. The insanity of the cultural revolution is a testament to that.
However, what you're saying is also true; there are documented historical examples of local officials, terrified of Mao, setting up faked fields with scarce crops from the neighboring area being transplanted into a single field specifically to "impress" Mao during his visits and avoid his ire.
Remember the Nazis were brought before an international court. The CCP never had a Nuremberg.
Im not sure if I understand what you are trying to say they were. Are you claiming that Mao and Stalin were sadists? I think it is more plausible they were altruistically motivated (greater good, ect).
Two times this video has been posted, and two times it's been flagged. Politician in center left UK party saying historys greatest mass murderer "did more good than harm".
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The history of Lysenko and his circle's influence on Soviet and Chinese farming, and the triumph of political influence peddling and ideology over reality, seems almost unfathomable, but was very real.
Along with human flesh, cannibals had feasted upon the brains of their victims.
> In 1921, the Lenin-led Soviet Union faced one of the worst famines in history. A new book details its horrors and the American effort to combat cannibalism